Struggling to Find Her Identity as a Black & Jewish Woman
My best friend’s journey through life while dealing with race and religion.
I was lucky enough to have been born in an era in which black people have found their voice and yelled “enough!” at those who had humiliated and diminished them. This and so many other resistance acts have been able to bring my people the basic human rights they deserve but that doesn’t mean that the world has changed for good and that prejudice was buried six feet under.
No, no at all. Growing up a black Jewish girl, I know all about what it means to be put on the side for your whole life.
My mom, whose family tree goes way back to the age of slavery in the state of Mississippi, married my father, a Polish Ashkenazi Jew whose family was able to survive the Holocaust by leaving everything they had behind and jumping on a boat towards the United States.
She was only nineteen years old, while he was a thirty-three-year-old bachelor, something almost unheard of inside the Jewish culture. I was born barely one year after they eloped (going against my father’s racist family’s will), and for the first ten years of my life, we lived in a happy interracial bubble, just me and my parents. Our Friday evenings would be filled with movie marathons and chocolate-sauced popcorn and Martin Luther King Day was always celebrated with barbecues or going out for lunch.
I was a happy American child growing up in a happy American home, and I only remembered we were Jewish (still I didn’t identify as one) when my father took me to the synagogue to pray once a year.
That all changed when we moved to Britain where my father’s whole family had been living at the time I was ten years old.
The first thing I noticed was that my grandma (or bubbe, how I was supposed to call her) insisted on showing her favouritism towards my fair-skinned, blue-eyed cousins to whom she would bake challah and rugelach whenever they felt like eating it.
Every time I went to visit her, she would spare me a light kiss on the top of my head and the words “hello, darling, how are you, darling” pronounced by her heavily Polish accented deep voice. To my cousins, she would happily sing songs in Yiddish and praise them for how intelligent and beautiful and wonderful they were.
As a child, I didn’t really understand what that happened. I supposed grandma (I always failed to call her bubbe) only liked my cousins better and that was all, until one day I heard my mother and my father arguing behind closed doors, and the words “I know your mother doesn’t love her just because she’s black! She won’t even kiss her cheek!” coming from my mother’s mouth, and suddenly everything became clear to me.
I was black, yes, but could I be Jewish while being black as well?
How could I be black and Jewish at the same time if even my own grandmother couldn’t see me as one of her own?
I shared my first name, LaVaughn, with thousands of black girls around the world, and my last name, Cohen, with thousands of Jewish girls as well. How could that be right?
And from that moment on I embarked on a tireless, frustrating trip in search of my true identity, one that would last several years as I grew older.
At school, when my name was called, professors would frown at me, check my last name again and ask “if I was really Jewish”. When I was with my friends and classmates, they would say “that I didn’t speak Black enough” (what does that even mean?) and that “my words were too polished for Black people to use them”.
I just smiled quietly and shook my head, trying to put those words to the back of my mind where they would never plague me again. Unfortunately, they did, each time growing louder and louder until I no longer knew who I was.
Because we were now closer to my father’s (very) Jewish family, we began to observe Shabbat and other religious holidays such as Passover and Rosh Hashanah, which I had only heard of.
Even though I didn’t feel exactly welcome by my grandmother, uncles, and cousins, I still had a wonderful ally who never failed to be by my side: my grandfather, or zayde, how I used to call him.
He never once made me feel like I was a foreigner or that my presence was unwanted. On the contrary: every time my grandmother would exhibit her favouritism towards my cousins, my grandfather would comment very loudly on how beautiful my hair looked that day and just how wonderfully I had performed in my finals at school.
If my grandmother lavished my cousins with gifts and delicious food, zayde would make sure to save me one last piece of challah and then would take me to his favourite bookstore (it was shared passion, books) in Piccadilly and tell me to choose “whatever I wanted”.
To this day I still believe that, during all the time we spent together, he never looked past the fact I was his son’s daughter, and therefore his own granddaughter, blood of his blood; whether I was black or white or Asian or German, he couldn’t care less.
It was my grandfather who helped me find myself back when I was going through a hard time in high school. I had stopped going to the synagogue because I felt like I was “too black” for Judaism and didn’t belong there, and also stopped attending most of my family’s events, such as birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, and High Holidays celebrations.
At school, there was this one malicious girl in my English class that started spreading the (false) rumor that all this time, I had been pretending to be Jewish and had lied that my father’s family had fled Poland before the Holocaust, just so people would pity me and be sympathetic.
Unsurprisingly, most people at my local high school believed her, after all, how could an all-American black girl like me belong to a Jewish family, right?
When walking through the hallways, people made sure that I would hear them whispering racist, antisemitic things such as “are there Jews in Africa?” and “so basically Hitler decided to spare the negroes?!”. I hurt in a way that I had never felt before, and when I couldn’t take it anymore and went through a horrible nervous breakdown, my grandfather came to my rescue.
Firstly, he went to my school and brought shame all over the director board for, “in the very twentieth-first century!”, letting something like that happen to a young girl who belonged to not one, but two of the most persecuted minorities in the world. I had never seen my zayde so angry before that day: his heavily-accented voice would echo in the school’s halls as he yelled at the principal, who didn’t even try to explain himself, instead choosing to lower his head in shame.
After that, when my grandfather and I were sitting in complete silence inside his old battered Ford, he asked me quietly,
“Was this the reason you stopped going to the synagogue with us?”
I nodded wordlessly.
“And that you have been missing Shabbat?”
I nodded again. He shook his head and put his hand over mine.
“You are so, so much better than those people, LaVaughn. So much brighter, so much kinder. Don’t allow their cruel words to put you down.”
“Your Judaism is not defined by the color of your skin, but by the love you carry inside your heart,” he told me.
“I know your bubbe acts like it’s a big deal, but it’s not. Being black won’t stop you from being Jewish as well, you don’t have to choose between the two of them! Don’t be ashamed to pray during Shabbat. Don’t be ashamed to go to the synagogue and ask Rabbi Steinem for advice. Don’t be ashamed of speaking Yiddish. And most important, don’t be ashamed of the color of your skin, for, in the end, it is the light you spread that really matters.”
That very morning, sitting beside my grandfather inside his stuffy, dusty car, I understood for the first time in my life just how blessed and special I was. I was born a child of the resistance, a symbol of hope to those black and Jewish people who fought against oppression all their lives. I had the best of both worlds, and no one could take that away from me by criticising my appearance or the words I used.
My Mother was Africa and my Father was Israel, and by being true to my roots, all of them, I was being true to myself.
For the first time in my life, I was proud of me, the real me that had been found at last.
